Note: I promise this isn’t going to become sort of exercise/fitness blog, but it seems like writing about it is one way to keep myself accountable, so here goes.

Today, I was planning to do my couch-to-5K workout again. Since it’s the weekend, I left Catie with Dave rather than hauling her along with me. I thought the gym’s daycare might be fun for her, since she enjoyed it last time, but the nursery is only open in the afternoon on Sundays. So no biggie, I set off for the gym by myself while Catie & Dave snuggled on the couch and watched cartoons.

I got to the gym, and the parking lot was… empty. I walked to the door anyway, and sure enough, there was a little sign stating that the gym doesn’t open until 1 p.m. on Sundays. It was 11:30 a.m. at the time. Sigh. That’s what we get for joining the YMCA, they’re closed on Sunday mornings because they assume everyone is at church. Even more annoying is that I thought ahead enough to look up the nursery hours online that morning, but not the actual gym hours. I’m clearly a genius.

I headed home, and decided since it wasn’t too hot outside (about 80 degrees, a lot cooler than it’s been over the past several weeks), I’d try to do my workout outside instead. Plus, Catie loves to ride in her stroller when I go for walks. So I headed home, loaded her & the jogging stroller up, and we drove over to our local community park. There’s a huge lake there, and the trail around it is exactly 2 miles. That’s about the length that I do during my 30-minute workout (5 minute warm-up, 20 minute walking/jogging intervals, & 5 minute cool-down), so I figured it’d be about the same, right?

Um, NO. Jogging outside as opposed to inside on a treadmill? TOTALLY different animal. Turns out that the added heat, plus the humidity, plus the hills (oh lord, the freaking HILLS) equals a workout that’s about a thousand times harder. I’m sure that pushing the 32-pound toddler in the jogging stroller didn’t help, either. I thought for sure I was going to pass out before we could get back to the car.

I wore Dave’s heart monitor/stopwatch because mine is broken and I wanted to keep track of my jogging and walking intervals. (Not that it did much good, I was only able to jog a full 90 seconds once, the rest of the time I could only do 30- or 60-second intervals.) And I’m pretty sure the heart rate jobby is busted because at one point it said my heart rate was 278. My resting heart rate is around 90. Um, pretty sure I’d be dead in that case, but thanks, stopwatch!

The good news, though, is that because it was so much harder and I wasn’t able to run as much as I was “supposed” to, I figured that it was going to take me a lot longer to go the full two miles. But I finished the course in 32.5 minutes, so it wasn’t much longer than my treadmill workouts at all. I’m pretty proud of myself for that, I guess I was running more than I thought I was.

Of course, now it’s three hours (and one lovely lukewarm shower) later and I still feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. But hey, that’s just proof of how hard I worked, right?